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Storytelling brings engineering to life

Amos presenting at the conference in Shanghai (Photo: TEDxFuxingPark and VPhoto)

Year 3 NUS Mechanical Engineering student Amos Heng shared his lifelong passion for storytelling with more than 200 guests at the TEDxFuxingPark conference on 21 April in Shanghai, China.

TEDxFuxingPark is an independently organised TEDx event dedicated to providing a platform for the sharing of ideas to spark conversation and help communities.

Sharing the stage alongside 11 prominent speakers at the conference, Amos, who is currently in Shanghai on a year-long NUS Overseas Colleges programme, spoke about his passion for novels as a young boy. His talk, aptly titled “Engineering a Story”, saw Amos sharing how he regularly uses the power of storytelling to bring technical presentations to life and make dry engineering concepts more relatable and engaging for the man on the street.

“Storytelling is great because it takes you into a world beyond your own. But storytelling doesn’t have to be restricted to just books and novels, it can also be brought into our lives and our careers by using it as a tool to communicate one’s passion. By setting the audience as the protagonist, creating a visual setting, narrating through a climax and key points, and ending off with a closure, one can make an otherwise boring presentation seem like a story worth telling,” explained Amos.

...storytelling doesn’t have to be restricted to just books and novels, it can also be brought into our lives and our careers by using it as a tool to communicate one’s passion.

— Amos Heng, Year 3 NUS Mechanical Engineering

As the main benefit of storytelling is getting people interested in what you have to say, Amos has used the technique throughout his life, from competitions and technical pitches to everyday interactions. Through this, he hopes to inspire and encourage other engineers to become more involved and outspoken.

“Standing on the same stage as speakers much more accomplished than me was definitely intimidating. But TEDx is all about sharing different perspectives and ideas and once I understood that, I realised that anyone can take the stage as long as they have a story to tell. It was an eye-opening experience that I would not have obtained without the opportunities and encouragement to put myself out there accorded by an NUS education,” said Amos.